If nobody owns the handoff, the buyer gets the work.

They explain what they already watched. Repeat the problem they need solved. Remind customer success what sales promised. Somewhere inside the company, several teams are checking off completed tasks.

The customer is still trying to connect the conversation.

Dusty and Tanner occasionally give me forty-five seconds of perfectly coordinated walking. Same speed. Same direction. Nobody trying to take my knees out with a leash.

I appreciate those forty-five seconds.

In this week’s Walking the Dogs, we look at what it takes to keep marketing, sales, and customer success moving together for longer than that.

Imagine a CIO attends your executive webinar. Three days later, a rep sends a generic introduction because the webinar context never reached them.

Now imagine sales closes a deal around three use cases, but customer success starts onboarding with only “Closed won.”

Every handoff should preserve what the buyer has already told you.

This is R7 in Reframe, Walking the Dogs Podcast #15 where we connect the growth choices we’ve made to the journey our teams need to support.

My suggestion: pick one journey, put it on the whiteboard, and walk it through together.

🐕 Name the owner of the next action.

🐕 Identify the context that must travel with the buyer.

🐕 Agree on the timing and what happens if progress stalls.

Then assign the fixes. Someone needs to carry those decisions out of the meeting.

Dusty and Tanner can choose interesting directions all afternoon. I still have to get the whole group home.

Read the full post: https://www.lisa-schwartz.com/b2b-funnel-orchestration/

Watch Episode 15: Walking in Sync: Orchestration Across the Funnel.

What handoff does your team need to walk through this week?

Every once in a while, Tanner sees a squirrel, another dog, or a bicycle and decides our walk needs a new strategic direction.

That is when one practical question matters: Who is holding the leash?

Companies create the same kind of chaos when leadership adds enterprise ABM, product-led growth, customer expansion, partner marketing, and AI operations to the plan without testing whether the team can execute them.

You may have ten priorities and enough capacity for four. You may have adequate headcount but the wrong skills. You may have several contributors but no end-to-end owner.

For every priority growth play, ask: Who owns the complete outcome? What specialist skills does it require? Does the team have protected capacity? Are the processes and handoffs clear? Do the data and systems support the work?

Fewer initiatives, properly staffed and clearly owned, will usually beat twenty initiatives competing for the same five people.

Watch the episode here: https://youtu.be/bS_9B_0aI1U

Read the full breakdown: https://www.lisa-schwartz.com/growth-strategy-skills-and-resourcing/

Then ask your team: Which growth priority are we pretending is resourced when it is not?

Dog walked.

Many companies are trying to run ABM, inbound, events, product-led growth, partner marketing, outbound, customer expansion, and executive thought leadership at the same time.

Every motion has an internal advocate.

Few companies have enough resources to execute all of them well.

When I walk Dusty and Tanner, I can choose the short neighborhood loop, the long one, this is how growth companies do it…Check it out here Your GTM Strategy Has Too Many Routes - Lisa Schwartz

Dusty can catch a scent during one of our walks and become completely committed to following it.

He does not stop to ask whether it is fresh, useful, or leading us anywhere we actually want to go.

Companies do the same thing with their ideal customer profiles.

Thanks for reading Walking The Dogs- Grow Revenue, Navigate Marketing Teams, Frameworks and Systems! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

They define an ICP, put it into a PowerPoint deck, and continue pursuing it while the market changes around them.

The product changes.

Competitors change.

Buyer priorities change.

Budgets change.

Technology changes.

But the ICP remains untouched.

In the newest Walking the Dogs episode, I explain how to walk your ICP around the block and challenge the assumptions behind it.

🐕 Which customers have the highest win rates?

🐕 Which customers implement fastest?

🐕 Which customers expand and renew?

🐕 Which customers generate the strongest economics?

🐕 Where are sales cycles painfully long?

🐕 Where is the product only a partial fit?

I also make three distinctions that growth teams need to understand:

TAM is who could buy.

TRM is who you should realistically pursue right now.

ICP is who you must be able to win.

Once you update the ICP, your positioning must change with it.

Your buyer needs to understand what important problem you solve, why it matters now, how you differ from the alternatives, and what evidence proves that you can deliver.

The goal is not to chase every scent in the market.

It is to identify the right customers, with the right problem, at the right moment, and give your company a credible reason to win.

Watch Updating the Scent Profile: ICP, Positioning, and the Competitive Lens here:

Dog walked. For more resources visit my website at Your ICP Has Gone Stale: How to Refocus Your Market and Sharpen Your Positioning - Lisa Schwartz

#GrowthStrategy #IdealCustomerProfile #Positioning #B2BMarketing #GoToMarket #WalkingTheDogs

Thanks for reading Walking The Dogs- Grow Revenue, Navigate Marketing Teams, Frameworks and Systems! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Brand teams often say they need more awareness, stronger thought leadership, greater share of voice, or category leadership.

Those may be worthwhile ambitions.

But you cannot manage an adjective.

When I take Dusty and Tanner to the dog park, Dusty sees dogs, people, noise, movement, and interesting smells everywhere.

Learn this and more perspectives. Listen...

Marketing generated the leads.

Sales completed the activities.

Customer success protected retention.

Product increased usage.

Finance protected margin.

Every team hit a metric, but the company still missed its growth goal.

That can happen when teams share a destination but operate with different priorities.

It reminds me of walking Dusty and Tanner.

Dusty sees a squirrel. Tanner finds something interesting to smell. I am trying to get home.

Technically, we are all on the same walk. Operationally, we are pulling in three different directions.

Businesses do the same thing when every function optimizes its own dashboard without connecting its work to one shared business outcome.

That is why the Reframe stage of my Growth Framework includes choosing a North Star metric.

Thanks for reading Walking The Dogs- Grow Revenue, Navigate Marketing Teams, Frameworks and Systems! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The North Star is not website traffic, impressions, MQLs, or the number of campaigns launched. It should represent an important growth outcome that multiple teams can influence.

Depending on the company’s real constraint, that might be:

🐕 Qualified pipeline in the priority market

🐕 Pipeline velocity

🐕 Expansion ARR

🐕 Time from qualified opportunity to revenue

The North Star does not replace every other KPI. It creates a hierarchy underneath one primary outcome so marketing, sales, customer success, product, RevOps, and finance can see how their work fits together.

In the latest episode of Walking the Dogs, I explain how to choose the metric, connect supporting KPIs to it, and expose the initiatives that no longer support the company’s growth strategy.

One destination. One primary outcome. One leash keeping the entire pack moving in the same direction.

What metric is your company actually walking toward?

Check it out and get additional resources at Your Teams Can Hit Every KPI and Still Miss the Growth Goal - Lisa Schwartz

There is a moment after every good diagnosis when people get impatient.

You’ve looked at the data. Found the performance gaps. Examined the market. Challenged the assumptions. Identified what isn’t working.

Now everyone wants to do something.

Launch the campaign.

Buy the platform.

Change the sales motion.

Move the budget.

But this is exactly where I think growth teams need to be careful.

In Episode 9 of Walking the Dogs, we’re moving from Gauge to Reframe in my Growth Framework.

Imagine I’m walking Dusty and Tanner and realize we’ve taken a wrong turn. I can walk faster, shorten the leashes, or get annoyed that one of the dogs keeps pulling.

It doesn’t matter.

We’re still headed the wrong way.

Reframe is the moment when you turn the map around.

Instead of asking, “What should we fix?” start with:

🐕 What does winning look like 12 to 24 months from now?

🐕 What must be true for that future to happen?

🐕 What needs to change this quarter?

🐕 What should we stop doing because it doesn’t get us there?

Years ago, I used to bring teams around a large whiteboard when we were working through a difficult business problem and say, “Let’s walk the dog.”

I’d put my incomplete thinking on the board. Other people would challenge it, add what I missed, and help turn the mess into a plan.

That’s exactly what Reframe is designed to do.

Gauge gives you evidence about today. Reframe turns that evidence into a point of view about tomorrow.

And perhaps the most important part is deciding not only what deserves more investment, but what no longer deserves any.

Thanks for reading Walking The Dogs- Grow Revenue, Navigate Marketing Teams, Frameworks and Systems! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Because strategy isn’t simply deciding what to do.

It’s deciding what you’re willing to stop doing.

Watch Episode 9 of Walking the Dogs: Turning the Map Around: The Future-Back Moment.

Then ask your team one question:

Are we optimizing the route, or have we actually agreed on the destination?

Read more here. Future-Back Growth Strategy: Turn the Map Around Before You Execute - Lisa Schwartz

Thanks for reading Walking The Dogs- Grow Revenue, Navigate Marketing Teams, Frameworks and Systems! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Subscribe to my Substack here https://walkingthedogs.substack.com/

A large total addressable market can make almost any growth plan look credible.

But a billion-dollar TAM does not tell you how many companies fit your product today, whether you can identify the right buyers, which channels can reach them, or whether your team has the capacity and budget to win them.

Listen to Walking the Dogs Podcast Episode 8 by Lisa Schwartz, Your TAM Is Probably Lying to You, and ask whether your team can name the exact accounts in its obtainable market.

Companies are racing to deploy copilots, predictive scoring, automated personalization, generative content, and AI agents.

The assumption is that adding intelligence will create better decisions.

But AI does not repair missing context.

It reasons from the information it can access.

Imagine asking an AI assistant to recommend the best walking route for Dusty and Tanner. It suggests a perfectly logical three-mile loop through the park.

The problem is that it does not know Tanner reacts to bicycles, Dusty stops for every squirrel, one trail is closed, the pavement is hot, I only have thirty minutes, and one of the dogs has already walked three miles.

The recommendation may be logical.

It is still wrong.

The problem is not the intelligence.

The problem is the context.

The same issue appears when a company asks AI to identify its best accounts, recommend the next sales action, predict churn, personalize a campaign, or allocate marketing spending.

The system may see CRM data but not sales conversations.

It may see campaign activity but not product usage.

It may see customer behavior but not revenue history.

It may see internal records but not market changes, competitor activity, hiring signals, or organizational events.

That is why AI readiness should begin with the Gauge stage of the Growth Framework.

Before automating a decision, companies need to audit their structured, unstructured, and external data. They need to assess whether the information is complete, accurate, consistent, current, governed, accessible, and connected to business outcomes.

The goal is not perfect data.

The goal is a unified context layer that allows employees and AI systems to work from the same customer reality.

In the newest episode of Walking the Dogs, I explain how to evaluate that context before AI confidently leads your company down the wrong route.

Watch the episode and ask yourself:

What decision are you asking AI to make before checking whether it has the complete customer and revenue context required?

That may be the next dog you need to walk.

Subscribe to receive future Walking the Dogs episodes and practical lessons from the G-R-O-W-T-H Growth Framework.

Also, visit the Lisa Schwartz blog for more resources.

Welcome back to Walking the Dogs.

It’s Lisa here, out with Dusty and Tanner, working off some canine energy and thinking through another growth problem.

Today, we are talking about dashboards.

Most companies do not have a shortage of marketing data.

They have campaign reports, attribution tools, CRM dashboards, budget spreadsheets, and quarterly reviews.

What they usually do not have is one trustworthy view of what is working, what is wasting money, what the organization can actually execute, and where the biggest growth gaps sit.

A dashboard tells you what happened.

A Gauge audit tells you why it happened and what to do next.

Dusty and Tanner are giving me a good example right now.

Both dogs are pulling.

If I only looked at the obvious metric, I would conclude that I have a leash-tension problem.

But that does not tell me why the walk is going badly.

Tanner may be reacting to another dog.

Dusty may be following a scent.

One leash may be too long.

A harness may be loose.

Or I may have chosen a route with too many distractions.

The visible result is the same, but the right solution depends on the cause.

I have to stop and inspect the entire walking system.

That is what a 360-degree Gauge audit does for growth.

It looks at four connected areas: performance, spend, technology, and team capability.

First, performance.

How much pipeline are you creating?

How quickly is it progressing?

Where are conversion rates breaking down?

What are your win rates, sales velocity, retention, and expansion rates?

Then break those numbers down by segment, product, channel, motion, and journey stage.

Blended averages often hide the real problem.

Second, spend.

Where is the budget actually going?

What does each channel, agency, platform,

event, content program, and

headcount investment produce?

Not just clicks or impressions.

What does it contribute to qualified demand, pipeline,

revenue, retention, or expansion?

And are you still funding programs that no longer support

the company’s priorities?

Third, technology.

Look at the CRM, marketing automation, intent data,

enrichment, attribution, analytics, and customer-success platforms.

Which tools are redundant?

Which are underused?

Which are disconnected?

Where is data unreliable or being moved manually?

A sophisticated tool on top of a broken process simply creates a more expensive broken process.

Finally, team capability.

Does the team have the strategy, content, creative, media, ABM, lifecycle, RevOps, analytics, data, and AI skills required to execute the plan?

And are roles and ownership clear?

The audit should produce five things:

A KPI scorecard.

A capability assessment.

A marketing-operations audit.

An opportunity heat map.

And a measurable baseline against which improvement can be judged.

Back to Dusty and Tanner.

If I shorten one leash, adjust a harness, and change the route, the walk may improve immediately.

That does not mean the dogs suddenly became better trained.

It means I diagnosed the system instead of blaming the most visible symptom.

Companies often do the opposite.

Pipeline falls, so they launch more campaigns.

Conversion drops, so they redesign the website.

Sales slows, so they buy another tool.

Those actions may be reasonable, but without a baseline, you do not know whether you are fixing the cause or reacting to the symptom.

So here is the question for your walk today:

What part of your growth system have you been trying to fix without first inspecting the entire leash, route, equipment, and walking team?

Until next time, keep walking the dogs.